"The world... ravaged... the sun beat down on the carbon stricken rock. Civilisation... a distant memory. Human-robot sex... the norm. Each day, every day, survival and ... how? this-thus."

A not too distant, distant too hot near-future.

Friday, 5 June 2009

... and the sun

Pop-Pop eased out of the flight harness and tied up his pterodactyl to the terminal post whilst the beast wetted its parched, serrated beak. It was then he slowly – quite deliberately – turned his head to observe the long-familiar scene he already knew awaited him. It had been a few years since the last visit – the doctor had warned him against travel, given the thinning rush of sand passing through his personal hourglass.

The – his – family stood huddled together in what can only be egregiously described as a cubist montage of erratically-sewn future garments: poncho-shaped patchwork-quilts of scavenged scraps that acted as a kind of lazy literal and metaphorical motif for their pathetic plight against this entropic environment. They stood still, watching each other. Silent. And then, as if to beak the freeze-frame moment, crawling from behind the coppice of their combined legs, he caught sight of the first human child (born unto man).

It had what looked like scraps from one of the red-top daily’s clutched in either hand, gleefully chewing from alternate clutched fists, whilst making high-pitched proto-vocalisations, reminiscent of those broken souls' wails who wander the Dead Zone, sun-mad, in the desert of their own collective mind. Pop-Pop bent down towards the golem-like figure and spoke unto it, “So, you must be the young Dog-Star Magnetron IV I’ve heard so much about, what you got there son?” One tiny eye tilted upwards in partial acknowledgement of Pop-Pop’s presence, and a strange lisping rasp replied, “It tastes like The Sun”.